Mr. President, we’re going to have to convince the American people about this war with Syria. Our polling shows more support for nuking Miley Cyrus the next time she twerks on TV than for your policy.

She does have a sweet little–

We have the Congressional midterms coming up, and Boehner is up my ass about defunding my healthcare legacy. I need this vote, or Hillary’s gonna kill me.

Right, right, sir.

(Licking of chops heard)

Kill them! Kill them all!

Easy Susan, I promise you’ll see the post-attack color close up photos first, then you pass them to McCain like always.

Yes, It likes the Precious Photos, It likes them.

Somebody get her some water or something?

So what’s our reason for Syria?

Hey, do we still have to put five bucks in the tip jar if we say ‘Slam Dunk’?

Seriously now people, we are committing American lives at risk here.

(General laughter in room)

OK, OK. We go to war in Iran–

Syria.

OK, war in Syria because of a red line.

Is that the same as a line in the sand?

No, ours is red. Very different.

Good one, sir.

Well, Americans have not been hooked tight enough by the red line. We need another reason.

OK, evil dictator, killing his own people, yadda yadda.

That has some traction, but roughly half of the dead in Syria were killed by ‘our own’ rebels, and those were their own people too. What else?

U.S. credibility?

(General laughter in room)

I think U.S. credibility went down the freaking toilet when you promised to close Gitmo and didn’t.

Shut up Chuck. Nobody asked you.

Goddammit, I served in Vietnam.

Yeah, so did John Kerry and Colin Powell, and you don’t see them whining.

So why don’t we just go old-school and say the Syrians attacked us in the Gulf of Tonkin?

Would that work?

Dammit, I had friends killed in Vietnam because of that lie.

I think one of my frat brothers’ dad got greased in Laos. Is that over there too?

Also, I read somewhere that we used napalm, white phosphorus and Agent Orange over there. Are those chemical weapons?

Yeah, but that’s history.

Not to the victims and their malformed children still alive, nor to the loved ones still mourning their dead at America’s hand.

O.K., back on track, how about, um, violation of international law?

(General laughter in room)

Maybe with our drones, ongoing indefinite imprisonment at Gitmo, torture, renditions, black sites, NSA spying on foreign heads of state, bringing down a sovereign leader’s plane because we thought that son-of-a-bitch Snowden was on board, pushing international law too hard might not be the best thing.

Easy Chuck.

Yeah, especially since until around 2006 we were rendering prisoners into Assad’s Syria for out-sourced torture.

Dammit Chuck!

OK, back to Iran. We bomb the hell out of Syria to send a message to Iran.

What message?

That they can’t support evil regimes.

But the Iranians have been supporting bad guys in Lebanon forever, these days the Taliban in Afghanistan, and basically control our allies in free Iraq. Hell, they even sent Qods force guys into Iraq to kill our own troops. Not sure here why Syria, now, is the place for a message.

So what do we have left?

I’d say we just keep saying ‘WMD, WMD’ over and over again until Americans beg Congress for a military strike on Syria.

I like that a lot. Any opposition? No? OK then, we go with WMD scare tactics.

Might as well.

Agreed. It worked last time.

O.K., thanks everyone. And thank you gentlemen for coming back to Washington to help see this through. John, would you be kind enough to walk W., Dick and Condi out please?

America’s would-be Secretary of State, Obama confidante and rumored former lover, and our next National Security Advisor, has the temerity to actually ask anyone to commit to ending torture? This is hilarious. Rice, and the people she works with, have fully abandoned reality and now just say whatever the hell suits the moment, confidant no one will even bother to remember what they said yesterday, especially America’s somnolent “journalists.”

Ho, ho, now the U.S. wants to criticize (other) people who commit torture, sure, why not put that out there? It’s what, the International Day for Victims of Torture? Maybe to celebrate the U.S. will force two cans of Ensure down the throats of those held indefinitely in Guantanamo. I hope to hell someone told the men waterboarded and otherwise brutalized by the United States that today’s their special day! Hey, the U.S. even let Bradley Manning wear clothes and eat dog food as a special treat!

Susan should read this formerly Top Secret CIA document explaining torture techniques, and noting the many “exceptions” field officers took– threatening with a power drill, claiming they would rape the prisoner’s female relatives in front of him, stating they would find and kill a prisoner’s children and so forth. One prisoner was waterboarded 82 times. Sleep deprivation was “limited” to only 11 days.

I strongly encourage everyone to get on The Twitter, find @AmbassadorRice, and send her a REPLY with your thoughts. Your comments, if read by anyone other than the NSA, will be read by one of Rice’s staffers, not the Evil Queen herself of course. While Rice’s pact with Satan is already written in blood, your remarks may free one of her staffers from bondage. Save a life, send a Tweet.

As a public service to Obama and his spanking-new National Security Advisor Susan Rice (Rice’s autobiography should be titled Failing Upward by Sucking Upward), here is a handy checklist to consult before deciding to intervene further in Syria.

Is it Iraq again? That went well.

Does it have oil?

Does it pose a direct threat to America, i.e., knife to our throat?

Can you define specifically what U.S. interests are at stake (no fair just citing generic “world peace” or “evil dictator”)?

Is Syria’s evil dictator somehow super-worse than the many other evil dictators scattered across the world where the U.S. is not intervening?

Does the U.S. have a specific, detailed follow-on plan for what happens if Assad departs?

Does the U.S. have a specific plan to ensure weapons given to the rebels, some of whom are openly al Qaeda, won’t migrate out of Syria as they did in Libya?

Does the U.S. believe its secret deal with the rebels to hand over Syria’s chemical weapons after they take power is airtight?

Can the U.S. tell with accuracy the “good” rebels from the “bad” rebels?

Has the U.S. considered in detail what affect a rebel (Sunni) victory in Syria will have on chaotic Iraq next door?

Why are Syria’s chemical weapon so different than say North Korea’s or anyone else’s that intervention is a good idea?

Extra Credit Questions

If the U.S. is regime-changing in Syria, why does the U.S. still diplomatically recognize the Syrian government? Discuss.

Why did the U.S. render prisoners to Syria for torture by Assad just a few years ago but now thinks he is an evil dictator? Discuss.

Since the American electorate overwhelmingly chose Obama over McCain in 2008, why is Obama acting more like McCain every day? Discuss.

Exactly why, after Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and drone wars everywhere, does the U.S. need to get sucked in to yet another Middle East quagmire? Discuss.

Obama and Rice, if the answer was “No” to any of the above questions, you should not intervene in Syria.

Bonus: The blogging software I use for this site requires “tags” be created to mark posts for searches. When I first started, the only country tag I needed was “Iraq.” Since then I have had to add Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Iran, multiple African nations and now Syria as places America is openly at war.

Obama, please do not nominate Susan Rice for Secretary of State. It has nothing to do with her being a woman, or a sort-of African-American, or even the Benghazi mess (though that’s a symptom of the broader problem). It has nothing to do with John Kerry’s Senate seat. Susan Rice is all appetite, all in for only herself and the Department of State, and America, needs a leader in the job, not another person primping her resume for what comes next.

A Biography Fit for a Queen

Look at Rice’s biography: She was raised in a well-to-do Washington DC neighborhood by elite parents. Emmett Rice, was an economist who in 1979 became the second African American appointed to the Federal Reserve Board. Her mother, Lois Dickson Rice, was a corporate executive and a longtime member of the College Board. Rice attended fancy schools — Beauvoir and the National Cathedral School. Her parents’ friends were people such as Madeleine Albright, the future secretary of state, who served on school boards with Rice’s mother, and whose former husband played tennis with Rice’s father. Albright became a mentor, helping to elevate Rice to assistant secretary of state for African Affairs when Rice was 32. They have been so close that people assumed Rice was her godchild, Albright said in an interview. Peggy Cooper Cafritz, a wealthy D.C. art patron, was a kind of surrogate godmother. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton took Rice to lunch when she was deciding whether to attend law school. Inheritances from husband Cameron’s and Rice’s families are largely responsible for her $20 million-plus net worth.

Rice finished her schooling in 1990, and started work as an international management consultant at McKinsey & Company in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Rice took a job with the National Security Council in Washington, D.C., under Clinton in 1993. She became special assistant to the president and senior director for African affairs in 1995. Only two years later, in 1997, Madeleine Albright made Rice assistant secretary of state for African Affairs when Rice was 32. It was unclear if Rice had ever been to Africa absent a short trip or two or done anything significant related to Africa outside of academia, or what the hell she knew about Africa at age 32 only seven years in the job market. Rice moved into a think tank during the Bush years and then the Obama campaign in 2008+. She has never worked outside of Washington since a brief job stint right out of school.

The Buck Stops Elsewhere

She was one of the youngest assistant secretaries of state ever. Among her accomplishments in the position was to be the top diplomat for African issues during the 1998 terrorist embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya.

In a 2002 op-ed piece in the Washington Post, former Ambassador to Sudan Timothy M. Carney and news contributor Mansoor Ijaz implicated Rice in missing an opportunity to neutralize Osama bin Laden while he was still in Sudan in 1996. They wrote that Sudan and Secretary of State Albright were ready to cooperate on intelligence potentially leading to Bin Laden, but that Rice persuaded National Security Adviser Sandy Berger to overrule Albright. Similar allegations were made by Vanity Fair contributing editor David Rose and Richard Miniter, author of Losing Bin Laden, in a November 2003 interview with World.

Rice, as assistant secretary for African Affairs, also contributed to the bloodshed on the Continent, saying at one point “Museveni [of Uganda] and Kagame agree that the basic problem in the Great Lakes is the danger of a resurgence of genocide and they know how to deal with that. The only thing we [i.e., the United States] have to do is look the other way.”

Rice also famously said about the horrific genocide then unfolding in Rwanda “If we use the word ‘genocide’ and are seen as doing nothing, what will be the effect on the November [congressional midterm] election?”

Oh, and yes, Rice’s misstatements about Benghazi, when she claimed that the attack was based on that silly anti-Islam film no one knew about until she honked about it on the Sunday teevee talk shows. According to Obama:

If Senators McCain and Graham and others want to go after somebody, they should go after me… but for them to go after the U.N. ambassador? Who had nothing to do with Benghazi? And was simply making a presentation based on intelligence that she had received? To besmirch her reputation is outrageous.

Not Rice’s Fault

But none of that was her fault and she had nothing to do with any of that in any way whatsoever. The buck always stopped somewhere else for Susan Rice.

“She always reminds me of someone who’s had every drop of Kool-Aid, always espousing 1,000 percent of whatever point of view the administration is putting forward,” said Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

So here’s the money shot: Susan Rice is not qualified to be Secretary of State. Susan Rice would have (Spoiler Alert) told six year olds on the Sunday talk shows that Santa Claus isn’t real if Obama asked her to say that. Susan Rice for all her life has been about promoting Susan Rice, about hitching herself to a powerful person (Albright, Clinton, Obama) and then doing exactly what she was told to do in return for favorable promotions and bureaucratic protection. Susan Rice is always the handmaiden of failure without ever being tainted by accepting responsibility. Susan Rice is 100 percent a product of the slimy sad way Washington works nowadays, people who ignore the “service” portion of “public service” simply for self-advancement. Susan Rice cares not a jot for the Department of State as as organization, and little for the United States as a concept. Both exist only to serve the needs of Susan Rice. Her self-serving nature has left enough collateral damage blood on her hands for two lifetimes.

There are some seven billion people on earth, and almost any one of them would be a better choice for Secretary of State than Susan Rice. We need better. Please?

Bonus: Additional blah blah blah on Rice from the New York Times and a significant contribution to hagiography by the Washington Post, polishing Hillary’s reputation.

It is always exciting to watch a new democracy form, nurtured along by a benevolent older brother. Instead, we have Libya, where for some reason no one can remember anymore, we are still at war.

Let’s run down the list: Did they attack us, like Pearl Harbor? No. Are they Nazis enslaving Europe? Nope. Did they steal our women and sell off our children? No. Anyway, just accept that we are at war to free Libya from the people who govern it, who are actually also Libyans.

It looks like some more freedom bombs were dropped on Libya. CNN reports:

NATO airstrikes hit a bakery and a restaurant in the Libyan city of al-Brega Saturday, killing 15 civilians, a Libyan government official told CNN. NATO denied the claim and said it had struck key command-and-control centers.

This kind of thing always makes me angry. In The Dirty Dozen or Private Ryan, whatever they blew up was just crawling with Krauts. Nobody was standing around saying “Hey, was that a bakery or a command center we just blew up?” Where’s Vic Morrow when you need him?

Vic Morrow also didn’t rape women, and it appears that the earlier claims by US UN diplo drone Susan Rice that sex machine Qaddafi had given his troops Viagra to encourage them to be rapin’ everybody may not be true.

Allegations that Muammar Qaddafi ordered the mass rape of women and passed out Viagra to his troops to give them more zeal for the task have been widely cited – most recently by Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC). But independent researchers who have sought to corroborate the claim in Libya now say they have found no evidence to back it whatsoever.

“We have not spoken to any victims or anybody who has met victims, except for the one doctor who has spoken a lot to the media,” said the researchers. “We approached her to see if there was anything more to learn from her, on this particular issue; she couldn’t put us in touch with any victims.”